Royal Society Opens Free Online Archive

greenechidna writes "The Register reports that the Royal Society has put its archives online. From the article: 'One of the world's most important historical records will be made available online for the first time today. All the Royal Society's journals are free for two months and include stone-cold scientific classics going back to 1665 and the foundations of modern inquiry.'" You can set up your own account at the Royal Society; if you follow the link in the Reg article, you get logged in to some random account.

Comments

DNA

[neonprimetime]

If you're bored at work, read this.

Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA (1954) - requires no introduction really

Re:DNA

[innes]

Rosalind Franklin if I remember right who did a fair amount of work on it, but so did others as well, Watson and Crick just got most of the Credit. And the Nobel prize which Franklin never got as she died before the award of cancer, and you don't get them posthumously

Re:DNA

[dan dan the dna man]

I have sat down and read this, as a geneticist for the first time. I'm surprised given how much I've read about the failure to credit Franklin with the work exactly how many times she and Wilkins are referenced and name checked all throughout the paper. At least once per page. It's lovely to read this paper though, without it I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing and to see the discovery of the structre laid bare like this rather than simply shown to me in a textbook is rather wonderful.

Re:DNA

[Quelain]

That's not their original paper, try this one:

http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf

This is the one with the classic line:
"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Oddest slashdotting ever.

[BadMrMojo]

Mobbed by Stephenson fans in 3... 2... 1...

Ra Ra Ra

[Doc Ruby]

Now will their Egyptian counterpart step up and one up them, offering free online access to 3000 years of archived research? Where's the URL for "What the stars look like 180 days before the Nile overflows its banks"?

Re:Ra Ra Ra

[Mr. Underbridge]

Now will their Egyptian counterpart step up and one up them, offering free online access to 3000 years of archived research? Where's the URL for "What the stars look like 180 days before the Nile overflows its banks"?

Unfortunately much of the contents of the library of Alexandria burned centuries ago.

Re:Ra Ra Ra

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, the Alexandria Library loss is largely myth. Sure, the library was burned. But ancient libraries, much like today's, did not house only unique copies. The ancient tradition of transcription was not solely to preserve "books" (usually scrolls and decks of leaves) serially in time, but also in parallel in space. There were many ancient libraries holding many of the same books.

Moreover, many of the Alexandria books weren't burned. They were "put into general circulation", both into the hands of centuries of attackers like the Arabs from whom European Crusaders (and their campfollower merchats) brought them to the rest of Europe for the first time, and throughout the area many times when security was breached. And of course there are the really ancient works written in stone monuments, artifacts and jewelry.

Ancient Egypt's working civilization lasted for thousands of years, inspiring its culture of actual immortality. Essential to it was a system of info transfer that would survive all kinds of unexpected disasters. If one burning library could wipe it out, we'd never have heard of it.

Re:Ra Ra Ra

[CxDoo]

Library of Alexandria was established by Greek dynasty and has little to do with ancient Egyptian civilization, about which, btw, we indeed knew very little before Napoleon's Egyptian Expedition.

Re:Ra Ra Ra

[Anon-Admin]

I dont see an opensource project on that. It would be nice but the number of people that can read Demotic and Hieratic is small. Many more can read Coptic, Kemetic Heiroglyphics and those could get translated.

I can only think of about 12 people who can translte Hieratic, and only another 13 or 14 that can transpose the Hieratic chacters to Kemetic Heiroglyphics.

It would be fun, but if you translate it and write it into a book you can re-copyright the works (my understanding of current copyright law)

I can see it now, Yes your honor He has violated the copyright on my book which is 3000 years old. :)

Ahh yes, the classics

[smooth wombat]

Nothing like perusing such illustrious titles as:

Matter and its Travels Through the Ether

Mercury: The Miracle Metal for What Ails You

How to Calculate Your Longitudinal Position in Only One Hundred Steps

Gravity: Just a Theory

Calculations for Determining the Age of the Earth Based on the Life Expectancy of Asses

A Treatise on Determining if Women on Ships Cause Shipwrecks

An Examination of Cthulhu and Whether It is Responsible for the Laying of Unknown Bones on the Tops of Mountains

Re:Ahh yes, the classics

[Goblez]

A Treatise on Determining if Women on Ships Cause Shipwrecks

Well, at least we know some of them had merit. Isn't this the same with women in cars?

Re:Ahh yes, the classics

[Silver Sloth]

Only pretty women in open top sports cars. Watch those macho boys go!

Re:Thanks, and I mean that, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Although a great gesture, this has far less use than I had hoped.

While I agree that having searchable text would be handy, keep in mind that what you are looking at is what people had to contend with for the past 350 years. They managed to do okay with it.

Edmund Stone Work NOT the Discovery of Aspirin

[dwm]

Small correction: Edmund Stone's work described in this article is not the discovery of aspirin (acetylsalycilic acid), but salycilic acid. Salycilic acid has about the same therapeutic effects as aspirin, but is much harder on the stomach. Aspirin was first synthesized by Bayer chemists in the late 1800s.

Re:Thanks, and I mean that, but...

[JesseL]

Not error-corrected OCRs of scanned images, but the actual images. Great for historians, I suppose, but absolutely bloody useless for searching.

Well it's all there for you - get to work.

That, my friends, is...

[sheepoo]

very interesting History!

This is pretty great

[cursorx]

Now I know of a good way to kill a rattlesnake [.pdf]!

Re:F/S

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is a lowercase s.

The "long s" looks like a letter f without the horizontal bar. The "short s" looks like the familiar letter s. Short s is used at the end of words. The Greek alphabet does the same kind of thing with lowercase letter sigma.

Wikipedia sez: Long S

The funny thing is, it turns out that this style of writing is where the character ß (used in German) comes from. I'd always just assumed it was borrowed from Greek.

Get it while it's hot!

[supabeast!]

Quick, somebody wget the entire site to redistribute as a torrent when they start charging!

What fun! Now I can take another look...

[dpbsmith]

One of the pleasures of graduate school was access to a very good research library. The university I was at had the Transactions of the Royal Society back to volume 1, number 1. (When I commented positively on this to a librarian, meaning I was delighted by this, she missed my point and tut-tutted, say, "Yes, I know, it's just terrible, but they won't approve the budget for expanding the Rare Books room...)

It was fascinating to open volumes at random at publication intervals of about fifty years and see the evolution of the scientific writing style. Before 1800, it was lively and enthusiastic and communicated a sense of excitement and joy. Around the mid-1800s a transformation took place and it acquired the stodgy, distanced, passive-voice writing style that persists to this day.

History

[ms1234]

The article says it's going to be open for 2 months. Why not longer? Information doesn't want to be public?

Discovery of the atomic nucleus

[bholzm1]

This is the experiment that led Rutherford to propose the nuclear model of the atom: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link.asp?id=u31 8373867x2v351

Royal Society lectures also available online

[pramodbiligiri]

For the last couple of weeks, I have been going through these extremely good scientific lectures at the Royal Society here: Archive - complete list of webstreams. They are available in Real and Microsoft Media Player formats.

Re:anyone going to archive this?

[Carthag]

As soon as I saw the announcement I got out my trusty curl & wget commands, but the urls are a complete nightmare. I suspect I'll have to write a 50+ line perl script to get it done! I'm working on it, though. First I gotta clean up some space on my HD ;)

There goes one more curmudgeon's anecdote

[Anthony]

Students at my University rarely visit the stacks these days. There are plenty of computers and a whole slew of online journals. When relating this story, I would tell people there is still a need to access the Transactions of the Royal Society. When I took my son on a tour of one of the libraries, I went straight to the Transactions and showed him a paper from the 18th century,

Well, I was impressed.